Mark Steel's In Town

On the way to a show in Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. So later, during the show, I mentioned this, asking the audience 'Is that your rival town?' And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, 'Keighley is a sink of evil.' Based on his award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, Mark Steel's ?In Town?, is a celebration of the quirks of small town life in a country of increasingly homogenized high streets. Steel's bespoke observations on the small, sometimes forgotten, towns of Britain goes right to the heart of British culture today, championing the very people who shape the places we live in now. ?As everywhere hurtles along a route towards being identical to everywhere else, it seems any expression of local interest or eccentricity is becoming a yell of defiance. Scrape away the veneer of Wetherspoons and Pizza Hut-inspired uniformity, and the march of Tesco's towards being reclassified as a...